itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

I took French in grade school, but didn't use it at all for about a decade. Duolingo was very useful for brushing off the cobwebs. In some ways, though, Italian is psychologically easier since I'm learning it from scratch. I don't go into it with the shameful feeling like I should already know such-and-such.

I keep thinking that a year in France would be ideal but I'm not sure yet how to swing it.

Re crowns: a friend suggested getting two crowns per topic, which is what he does. I have been trying this recently and finding it helpful. More crowns seems to be diminishing returns. In the old system I could get burned out keeping a tree gold or feel bad when it started to decay

Do they still decay? I restarted spanish and am doing it from scratch by just testing out until I can no longer test out. I have the same ocd about keeping everything gold.

I hardly have any gold lessons anymore, I think I did it once or twice in some trees I barely look at, so not sure if and when decay happens

Mine haven’t decayed. Maybe the don’t do that until your entire tree is gold. Please let us know when that happens:)

https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002253131-Crown-level-decay-and-spaced-repetition
No more decay. Also, I agree 100% with the last sentence

oh good. That was kind of the worst. Especially if you did a bunch of modules all in one day so they all lost their gold all together.

Oh yeah, forgot about that.

Thanks, that article is helpful! I like the "two crowns" rule too. I've racked up a lot of crowns on the very early stuff and it definitely feels like diminishing returns.

btw it turned out that "Practice" was giving me questions from skills I hadn't seen yet because I'd tested out of some skills ages ago and forgotten about it - I didn't look at Duolingo for months and then resumed going through them one by one. So I guess it probably doesn't do that normally.

Acabo de llegar a la racha de 800 días hoy.

¡Enhorabuena!

¡Gracias!

I'm working through getting the full Spanish tree to gold again by testing out each subject to jump levels, but it is still taking forever. With five levels per subject the course seems huge compared to when I originally finished the tree, though I'm not convinced on how much actual new content there is in there as there seems a lot of repetition. Duolingo has me at 3170 words learned at the moment, but unfortunately can't remember what that was in previous times.

Sloppy typing...

*there seems to be a lot of repetition
*unfortunately I can't remember

Do you think it’s worth it to do all that? Maybe you should try the Reverse Tree instead.

Or, if you are up to up it, you could try to “ladder,” and learn another language through Spanish.

I guess I still feel like it's useful for me as well as simply being a force of habit at this point. I don't think I'm learning much new material from it, but it gives me 5-10 minutes of Spanish practice every day, which is definitely a good thing and in practical terms it certainly helps to cement vocabulary. For a long time it was really quite boring, but as I progress further down the tree again I enjoy it more as the more complex sentences and different tenses starting to come in. I still have a 2 hour Spanish class once a week which is my real focus (currently finishing up A2 level and hoping to start B1 in the spring) and Duo is just a quick daily practice, especially when life is too busy or too stressful to have the motivation to study more independently outside of class.

Yeah, I've done a fair bit of the reverse tree as well, but switched back when they revamped the Spanish course and haven't looked at it since. I should go back to it, for sure. I haven't tried learning another language from Spanish via Duo, but that's a nice idea, I hadn't thought of that. I've found some Basque courses elsewhere that will need to be done from Spanish when I have a little more time, which I'm really looking forward to!

Wow, where are those Basque courses you speak of?

There's one here, but the website navigation isn't great and I've only managed to get on to a Basque for Spanish speakers course despite them saying it should be for English users: https://www.hiru.eus/es/e-ikasi/idiomas/ikasten/ikasten-for-english-users

There should also be resources here and perhaps a full course, but I haven't investigated this one so much and again I struggle with navigating the website and keep getting lost in its subsites: http://www.ikasbil.eus/web/ikasbil/home

Het is over tussen ons!

I really, really need to become very fluent in Spanish but seeing Japanese and Hawaiian! now on duolingo... arg. It's that stupid boyfriend meme.

Hm i like japanese more than spanish i have to admit

Hawaiian course is super short and you can finish and make your tree gold in a matter of days if you want.

Doubt that Duolingo will make you fluent in Spanish.

Also, found the Japanese course a little disappointing.

Chinese course is nice though, especially having the notes available through the app.

I know a ton of spanish vocabulary just from hs and life but I just got super lazy about grammar, so duolingo is helps there. Chileans have a lot of weird slang here, so getting drunk and interrogating people is the only thing for that. And they call avocados "palta"! Maybe i will do the hawaiian one next week.

It’s the quechuan influence

South american spanish has that so it is slightly different from central american spanish, and both of these different from mexican spanish

Then you have all the dialects/slang/regionalisms across all spain and latin america

If you have any questions i can explain what i know

First Duolingo question of the day and it's one to really set me up for a day of fun and adventure. pic.twitter.com/U3jSGHTVUm

— Charlotte Gore 🏳️‍🌈 (@CharlotteGore) October 21, 2018

(thread of Swedish duolingo)

xpost are you chilean (I forget)? I've been here for almost two years total now and I only want to learn the slang that no one uses anywhere else.

Not chilean but i studied Spanish for a long time (10 years?) and visited a few countries, plus just general knowledge from being friends with/having girlfriends from south america

I don’t know much chile specific slang but i know some south american slang and it’s more or less similar

Has anyone used the language app Lingodeer?

xpost The slang I hear the most (I've been coming here for the last ten years are):

"Flaite
means “trashy” or “chavvy.”

Cuico/Cuica
“Upper-class” or “snobby.”

Wéon (spelt huevón)
...commonly used word in the Chilean language. It can be intended as a rude term, especially if used with strangers, but it can be used among mates and be a term of endearment. Wena on its own can mean “ok,” “good,” or “hi.”"

apart from huevon as mentioned above

i like

bacan: cool

cachar: to understand

wea: thing, generally when you can't find the correct word for something it becomes "esta wea"

huevear: to annoy

carrete: a party/a night out

pololo/a: boy/girlfriend

pega: job

yerac, you might already be familiar with this site, but this is good for etymologies and chilean slang: http://etimologias.dechile.net/

but yeah, huevon/weon/wea/huevada/huevear, and bacan, are all used in other parts of south america, especially peru

cachar means to fuck in peru

one thing i always found funny is carajo means shit, right? well in venezuela and other parts of latin america they call small children carajito

there's all sorts of things like that in latin america though

yeah like guagua means baby in chile but bus in cuba

ha that's true

Xpost

LingoDeer is better for Japanese, at least, as it explains the grammar points where Duolingo doesn’t. Can’t comment on other languages.

안녕하세요

iPhone app looks quite different now

All the drawings are now more jolly for one thing. As is Golden Duo, who no longer has a flag draped over his shoulders

MENOS DE 10
2 SLICES
MASAJE GRATIS
RINGS CHEESE FRIES

Ha, wrong thread

or IS it?

Ha, exactly.

But came back to post: Hawaiian now has sound

Looks the same again. Must have been a temporary switcheroo

Jij hebt mijn stijl gestolen.

Jouw woorden zijn net poëzie.

Think there must be some sort of server shortage and when I see the older style icons, which just happened again, it is throwing me on some dev server.

is there an astroturfing push on at the moment? - i keep getting alerts about old complaints i lodged in the forum where some doofus comes out with a reply something like " y'know what's really clever about duolingo? - that they do this that or the other"( which is actually garbage and helps nobody learn anything practical...) always ascribing some kinda overarching plan to the random slew of shit nobody says which is the same at level 1 as it is at level 30

Don’t know anything about that.

Just reinstalled and it looks the way it has been looking as of late but performs much better.

En we zingen en we springen en we zijn zo blij.

The Duolingo forum has a few threads with people complaining about the new look and some changes to scoring on the android app.